Tuesday, April 21, 2009

kunst für alle

[Ruskin, from Fors Clavigera 7 (1 July 1871), on a report that the Louvre had been set afire in the fighting over the Paris Commune:]

For, indeed, I am myself a Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red; and was on the very point of saying so at the end of my last letter; only the telegram about the Louvre's being on fire stopped me, because I though the Communists of the new school, as I could not at all understand them, might not quite understand me. For we Communists of the old school think that our property belongs to everybody, and everybody's property to us; so of course I thought the Louvre belonged to me as much as to the Parisians, and expected they would have sent word over to me, being an Art Professor, to ask whether I wanted it burnt down. But no message or intimation to that effect ever reached me.